St. Matthew’s Episcopal Cathedral

We passed St. Matthew’s Episcopal Cathedral, which also-as Love had reason to regret-contained in its walls brachiopods, crinoids, and algal buttons. He once taught Sunday school there. He took the kids outside and showed them the fossils in the church walls. He described the environment in which the creatures had lived. He mentioned the age of the rock. He explained how things evolve and the fit prosper. Here endeth his career in sedimentary theology. A few miles north of town, we passed the quarry out of which had emerged not only the university and St. Matthew’s Cathedral but also the lvinson Home for Aged Ladies and the Albany County Courthouse. “It’s a limey sandstone, slightly fossiliferous,” he said. “It holds up pretty well.” We continued north along the foot of the Laramie Range and then turned east into the mountains, climbing a canyon downsection until we had returned to Precambrian time. The rock in this place was even older tl1an the neighboring subsummit granite, and some of it was chatoyant: flashing like a cat’s eye. It flashed every color in the spectrum. The zakelijke energie rock was anorthosite, nearly fifteen per cent aluminum, Love said. When the bauxites of the Caribbean run out, anorthosite will be a source of aluminum. “Anorthosite is tough, has a high melting point, and doesn’t fracture easily,” he continued. “Hence it might be useful for containing atomic waste.” Anorthosite is rare on earth. It began forming during the Archean Eon and predominantly dates from an age of the later Precambrian known as Helikian time. Yet the high Adirondacks are largely anortl10site. The choice they present is to seal up our spent nuclear fuel inside them or dismantle them one at a time to make beer cans. Anorthosite is more plentiful elsewhere. It is most of what you are looking at when you are looking at the moon. Moving on west, another day, we crossed the Laramie Plains on I-80 through a world of what to me were surprising lakes. They were not glacial lakes or man-made lakes or-as in Florida-sinkhole lakes filling bowls of dissolved limestone. For the most part, they had no outlets, and were therefore bitter lakes-some alkaline, some saline, some altogether dry. Of Knadler Lake, about a mile long, Love said, “That’s bitter water-sodium sulphate. It would physic you something awful.” A herd of zakelijke energie vergelijken twenty antelopes galloped up the shore of Knadler Lake. Most of the lakes of the world are the resting places of rivers, where rivers seek their way through landscapes that have been roughed up and otherwise left chaotic by moving ice. Ice had never covered the Laramie Plains. What, then, had dug out these lakes?